When
you’re standing on the cusp of a new century, you look forward and you
look back. A century ago seems far away, but the connections are still
there — connections within our own lives. When my grandmother was a child
in 1910, in an isolated company mining town in Appalachia, the concept
of “information” had little meaning. Her little town, Six Mile Run, had
fewer information resources than a dentist’s waiting room: the Bible, hymnals
in the church, a few books at the schoolhouse, the Sears-Roebuck catalog,
the Farmer’s Almanac, and perhaps a newspaper brought in from Pittsburgh.
A century later her granddaughter, her namesake, is flooded with information,
data delivered by devices few of us could have imagined even 20 years ago,
and earns her living as a librarian and Web developer.

I suspect that
few of my generation have known the respect accorded to the barely trained
teacher or the town minister in Six Mile Run. They were looked up to, not
because of their information collections or skills, but because they had
“learning.” When information and learning are scarce, the few who possess
it have power and influence in the community. Twenty years ago when I first
began working as a librarian, there was still a sense, shared among those
in the library and the outside community, that we were — by virtue of our
education and our information skills — occupying a leadership role for
public information and opinion. We were acknowledged as guides, teachers,
“educated folk,” and, from time to time, our patrons would defer to our
greater knowledge and expertise. There were moments early in my career
when I would sense a sort of respect for me as a representative of the
archetype “lady librarian.”

Don’t get me wrong
— this wasn’t a steady rush, more like a flicker here and there. But as
a librarian I did sometimes sense a bit of prestige attached to my job.
Later in my career, as I learned to maneuver through complicated online
tools, sometimes producing magical results to the wonder and amazement
of patrons and non-searching staff, I too felt a kind of thrill that I
had become a living interface between technology and human knowledge. Access
to those systems was exorbitant in price and limited to a few elite searchers
on the general library staff. I was a gatekeeper, and in that, I felt connected
to the role I might have played in my grandmother’s town in an earlier
era.

As end-user tools
began to come forward in the mid-’80s and the gates went down, so did the
gatekeepers. We librarians were chagrined to find that our users often
preferred interacting with those tools to interacting with us. We knew
they weren’t getting our skilled and sometimes magical results but, to
quote a phrase that would resonate for the next 15 years: “They seem to
be getting enough without our help.” Looking back, I ask myself if our
growing feeling of being on the margins and the continuing preoccupation
with our professional image did not reflect a kind of mourning for the
loss of our historical role as “central mediator” or gatekeeper. Perhaps
we grieved over the disappearance of our last connection with the power,
influence, and even minor prestige of being the most educated person in
a very small town.

Us or ThemThe Internet and
the World Wide Web have driven a stake into the heart of that gatekeeper
role. The loss continues to resonate. Throughout my life as a librarian,
the profession has been obsessed with defining professionalism. Twenty
years later, with little to show in terms of changes and tired of going
in circles, we’ve boiled it down to debating a single word. Shall we continue
to call ourselves librarians? Pick one: yes, no, maybe. No matter what
we decide, if indeed we decide at all, the real question remains, “What
do we bring to the party?” Because the party is happening with or without
us.

Perhaps it’s a
blessing that few practitioners read the professional literature. Down
here on the ground, things are changing, changing fast, and changing for
the better. At the core of the gatekeeper concept was the idea that we
knew better than those we served. For generations, we now seemed to realize,
we had thought in terms of us serving them. And now we were all in the
same soup. As librarians struggled to learn, making valiant strides in
hooking up and logging on, in configuring and networking, in creating our
own Web sites and distributed information systems, our users kept pace
with us. Many surpassed us. We realized that we were no longer a gate but
one open door among many open doors. It has been my impression that, in
large part, we information professionals have really begun to see that
there is no “them” and “us.” There is only “us” and we are all doing the
best we can.

The biggest change
in the profession, over this century and in my lifetime, is a new sense
of “partnering” with our communities, our clients, and each other. We now
live in an information economy not based on scarcity, but rather on glut
and noise. The missing element is meaning and the new emphasis on mutual
learning. But though this change has already begun and is deepening, I
wonder how conscious we are of how our role has evolved and changed. The
old role, while stereotyped and restrictive, was familiar and, in many
ways, pleasant. We never had enough — money or resources — but we ourselves
were central to the transaction — even if our centrality, for the last
15 years, has been primarily in our own minds.

When I hear, as
we all have, that we must “reinvent ourselves,” I look around and see that
in many ways we already have. In small actions we are reinventing ourselves
every day. It’s the awareness of the reinventing that takes time. We can’t
know what those ways are until we shift our vision a little and get a new
kind of language to describe what’s happening. Before we construct any
grand theories about best practice and who we’ll be once we have morphed,
let’s look at two “little” moments from real life.

Defining SuccessA woman phones
the general reference desk of a small city library asking for “the latest
information on treatments for fibromyalgia.” One of her relatives has just
been diagnosed and she wants to send him some information.

Elaine, working
the desk alone, feels a sense of panic. These thoughts run through her
mind at the speed of light: “I am not a specialist.… I haven’t done a Medline
search in a long time.... Could the patron make any sense of a Medline
search? I wonder if our neurology textbook is current? Could the patron
make sense of the textbook? Who is the patron — this woman or her relative?
How do you spell fibromyalgia? It IS neurology, isn’t it? How long will
this take me? Can I afford to spend all that time? Where do I begin?”

Her next thoughts
offer an easy way out: “I’ll just tell the patron to come in and then whoever
is here can help her sort through all this. That fits with policy and practice,
that’s what the collection is for, that’s what the library is for. Or I
could refer her to a medical library, though I’m not sure they’d have the
time to help her.”

Then Elaine remembers
that she has worked with this patron many times in the past. This woman
is about 75 years old and a regular customer of the library, especially
on the telephone. While not interested in doing research herself, this
patron serves as an unofficial librarian to her own circle of family and
friends. She connects with this circle by providing them with the information
they need — almost always from information gathered by a similar phone
call to the reference desk.

Constraining her
own anxiety about medical research, Elaine says, “OK, I’ll see what I can
find and call you back.” She goes to The Librarians’ Index to the Internet
[http://lii.org], selects “Diseases,”
a subcategory of “Health,” and finds “Fibromyalgia” as a heading. Two major
sites are listed and annotated. Checking both, she prints out the top page
from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia — Ask NOAH site [http://www.noah.cuny.edu/neuro/cfs.html],
and two other files: “A Patient’s Frequently Asked Questions about Fibromyalgia”
and “A Physician’s Guide to Fibromyalgia Syndrome.” Both are readable,
current, and good beginning points for asking more specific questions and
searching for more specific answers.

Elaine calls the
patron back and says, “I have some current material from the Web on fibromyalgia.
I’d like to mail it to you and then you can let me know if you want more
specific information. If you don’t have a connection to the Internet, I’d
be happy to get you started here at the library and help you explore the
topic.” When she checks back with the patron a week later, she hears, “That
was exactly what I needed. I sent it to my cousin. Thanks for getting it
to me so quickly. I’m sure it will help him figure out what to do next.”

I listened to Elaine’s
story and said, “That sounds to me like a job well done.”

“Was it?” she said,
suddenly hesitant. “It was so easy that I’m not sure that I did a good
job.”

“Ah,” I laughed,
“so you think it only counts when it hurts? Which do you think your patron
preferred: Coming into the library and spending hours with you? Reading
through a pile of photocopies from medical texts or consumer health journals?
Waiting for an interlibrary loan of an appropriate title? Reading through
a Medline search? Having a phone number for a Fibromyalgia Association?
The Fibromyalgia Association has already done much of that work — far better
than you could in the time available to you!”

“You’re right,”
she said. “But I still have a feeling I should have done all the things
you mentioned. It feels, and I wonder where this feeling comes from, that
unless I do ALL of the above, I haven’t done a professional job. I’m not
sure that what I did ‘measured up.’”

I continued, “But
when you told me the story there was pride in your voice. You were proud
that even though this request made you anxious and there were easy ways
to avoid the question, you went ahead and provided great information that
met your patron’s immediate need. And you did satisfy the patron. She said
so! Could it be that your uncertainty isn’t about the patron — who is delighted
— but about your own sense of yourself? Even while you are helping patrons,
are you looking over your shoulder and trying to please someone else? Who
do you want to really please?”

Elaine laughed.
“Maybe what I wanted was to tell another librarian, someone I trusted,
about this transaction. Maybe I wanted permission from a colleague that
this interaction (and now that I think of it, I DID do a fine job) WAS
service. I feel as if there is an invisible standard that I have never
understood. The standard says, ‘Real information is hard to find, takes
hours to assemble, and requires more expertise, more collection, more resources
than I ever have.’ And you know, when you think of it that way, I am failing
every day, but I can always blame it on my lack of a resource. Funny, now
that you mention it, but maybe my feeling of success was so unfamiliar
that I had to turn it into a failure? I’m pretty good at explaining failure.

“And you know what?”
she added, obviously on a roll, “there have been so many times in my own
life when all I wanted was a place to begin. Some information that could
get me started, get me calmed down, let me think about what to ask next.
Maybe I have done a good job after all. Maybe this is my job — moving people
one step forward and letting them come back and ask for more, if they need
it?”

Is There a Doctor in the House?It’s Saturday,
3 PM, and every one of the 20 Internet terminals at a large county central
library is occupied by motionless patrons, heads down, shoulders hunched
over the monitor. “They look like an Olympic team of synchronized typists,”
Jackie thinks to herself. She notices one man waving his hand in the air
and looking in her direction. “How unfortunate,” she thinks, “that we have
to resort to waving. But the patron and I both know that if he leaves his
seat for even a moment, he will have — according to the rules of war —
abandoned his terminal.”

Jackie walks over
to the gesturing patron. He tells her he’s been trying for the last 25
minutes to set something up in his HotMail account but nothing he’s tried
has worked and now he can’t access his account at all. Jackie looks at
the screen and skims through the “Help” file. Not surprisingly, this problem
isn’t addressed. She looks at her patron, who’s now hovering behind her.
“I’ve seen that look before,” she thinks. “It’s how I felt the time I lost
my Excel file after 5 hours of work. It’s how I felt when I had to install
new printer drivers and the manual was more confused than me.

“But,” Jackie reasons,
“I’m not sure I’m going to figure this out either. I could look for a Dummies
book on e-mail; maybe this issue is covered. I could ask another librarian
or call the tech staff if I can find them. I could tell the patron to send
an e-mail to the HotMail help center ... but wait, he hasn’t GOT e-mail
at this point.” Suddenly, she feels a new resolve. She stands up and looks
around her at the Olympic typing team.

“Does anyone here
have a HotMail account?” she asks in her loudest, modulated voice. Startled
heads tip up. “I do,” says a teenager at the end of the second row. Jackie
walks over to her. “Would you be willing to see if you can help the gentleman
over there? I’ll sit at your terminal until you come back and hold your
place.” Three minutes later, the teenager returns with a look of success
and accomplishment, and heads lift up to watch her pass. She’s about a
foot taller than before. Jackie looks over at the Hot Mail Man and he raises
both arms in a touchdown signal.

What’s Perfection Got to Do
with It?It’s time to start
paying attention to stories like these, mundane as they are. It’s time
to look at what we’re doing from moment to moment and how we feel about
it. What is service? What is success? Who sits in judgment? Do we base
our daily actions on surveys, studies, procedure manuals? Do we wait for
permission? Or do we learn to stand firm in our own experience, judgment,
and authority to make decisions? Though we’ve lost the automatic respect
of the world for the “lady librarian,” we’re often reluctant even to respect
ourselves. We’re not sure we can trust our own, real-life information actions.
There’s a sense that we’re waiting for validation to come from outside:
from our institutions, our clients, our financial status. We wait a very
long time for someone to tell us who we are. And while we wait our position
seems to erode! Perhaps it is time to try a new approach and grant ourselves
professional authority and with it, permission to be a skilled and experienced
partner to those we serve, rather than continuing to take on a superhuman
responsibility for a job we simply cannot do — namely, completely answering
any question the human mind can devise on an hourly basis.

In those two real-life
stories, the librarians trusted their experience and knowledge about the
individual patron, the situation, the level of service. Both librarians
were aware of a range of possible responses: Elaine knew that she could
ask the patron to come into the library and get assistance, of whatever
kind; Jackie could have shrugged her shoulders and said, “This isn’t my
job. This isn’t my expertise.” And I would suggest, even though Jackie
didn’t express any ambivalence about her decision, there are library and
staff cultures that would have criticized her for involving another patron
in the transaction. Both stories show that at the service point, we all
take risks, no matter how often we are told that as a profession we are
“risk-adverse.” I think we take risks every day, but we are caught in a
massive conflict in our internal operating instructions as we evolve from
information gatekeepers to information partners.

The evolution has
begun. We just need to be able to see it.

In Elaine’s story
the real issue is perfection, some unattainable and unexamined standard
that she has never been able to live up to. While aware of her vulnerability
to criticism from an unsympathetic colleague or supervisor, she also knows
what her patron needs right now and what she can do right now. Elaine is
caught in a double-bind: She can struggle to please internal (and perhaps
external) notions of perfection, or she can help the patron by supplying
some, not all, of the relevant information immediately. As we move from
an information economy based on scarcity to an information economy based
on glut and noise, we’re all finding ourselves in Elaine’s situation: caught
between an unreal idea of “the job we should do” and the daily, less perfect,
helping actions that move the patron one step forward at a time. When this
double-bind is unconscious, it provokes tremendous anxiety and perhaps
paranoia. We’re damned if we do give maximum service — because we’re not
staffed for it and because often the patron doesn’t want it, preferring
a little help now to beautiful help at some unspecified date. We’re damned
if we don’t give maximum service — because then we carry around a pervasive
sense of failing to live up to our own standards.

One way to resolve
the conflict between perfection and practice is to shut down. We’ve all
heard about librarians (never ourselves) who are just killing time until
retirement. Another way out is “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never
jam today.” If you recall, Alice in Wonderland says, “It must come sometimes
to ‘jam to-day.’” “No it can’t,” replies the Queen, “It’s jam every other
day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.” The Jam Tomorrow way
out of the conflict comes out as, “If I helped you, as I have been trained
to help you and have sometimes helped others in the past, I would have
to check through all these strategies and resources to get you absolutely
everything you need. But since there’s no way I can make that kind of investment,
all I can do is look in the OPAC and point you to the shelf.”

I see the conflict
between perfection and practice as the basic barrier to offering interactive
information services online, to taking our services to the client rather
than having the client come to us and play by our rules — rules, we must
admit, we don’t always understand ourselves. Anne Lipow has coined the
phrase “In Your Face Reference” [1] to describe this shift towards the
client’s time and place and need: “Library reference service will thrive
only if it is as convenient to the remote user as a search engine; only
if it is so impossible to ignore — so ‘in your face’ — that not to use
the service is an active choice.” The technology, even something as primitive
as e-mail reference service, is in place and ready to be used. But if we
can’t measure up to an inflated and anxious standard of perfection in the
slower pace of in-person and telephone transactions, how on earth can we
offer anything approaching “real-time” service on the Web? We’re talking
major shut down unless we can bring this issue to consciousness and try
to resolve it.

What can we use
as our guide in trying to resolve this double-bind? Both stories give the
clue. Elaine understands that her patron needs a quick, reliable, current
overview of the situation — and perhaps a way to “understand more later.”
Elaine has empathy for the patron, picturing herself in the same situation
and asking what she would find most helpful. And, just in case her empathy
is off-base, she offers “more or different help” as the patron decides.
Jackie sees the look of panic on her patron’s face as he imagines his e-mail
account evaporating and remembers having the same feelings when she’s wrestled
with technology and lost.

Empathy is something
we have always used to give good service — but often opposes concepts of
“information perfection.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines
empathy as: “identification with and understanding of another’s situation,
feelings, and motives.” Technology, of whatever kind, is itself so very
frustrating because it has no empathy for the user. At least at the beginning
of the 21st century, technology still forces the user to understand technology’s
motives rather than the other way around. Who better to provide this empathy
than the librarian realizing that there really is no “us” and “them”? What
other profession has stepped forward to claim empathy as its way of connecting
people with information? What other imperfect profession is ready to take
on the challenge of imperfect humans and imperfect technology?

The irony is, we
can no longer deliver either “come to me” or “in your face” information
services without examining the standards of perfection in our own heads,
floating about in institutions, and in our all-too-saintly presentations
about “how good we are.” We are good — but good and perfect are not the
same. As long as we hold ourselves to an unachievable (and often undefined)
standard, we are opting out of the messy work that no one else wants —
helping people get unstuck one moment at a time with the tools and expertise
at hand. This is the real work that needs doing, and no one else wants
to do. All around us, we are doing the messy work every day but we’re still
a bit ashamed of it. We judge ourselves too harshly because we can’t see
that “mess and imperfection” lie at the heart of what we do. Our value
is firmly planted in our ability to see ourselves, information, and our
patrons realistically and to act effectively anyway. Call me what you like
— I don’t have any problems with the word “librarian” — but call me when
you need some help. That’s what I’m here for.

Channeling ExcellenceAs my tales from
the field show, Voltaire was right when he observed that “the best is the
enemy of the good” — particularly if the best is always something we’ll
have tomorrow ... just as soon as we figure it out. A partnership role
for librarians is emerging out of the necessity to take action now, give
service now. The new role will change us for the better. We are learning
that whereas gatekeepers ration resources, expertise, access, and service,
partners distribute them. Whereas gatekeepers dispense, partners collaborate.
Gatekeepers are granted external authority; partners work to develop relationships
and trust.

As we partner with
the patron to meet immediate needs, what we most need now is to establish
a connection that the patron can count on and access at will. How often
have you called the library, any library, only to hear that your “partner,”
“your librarian,” is not available? “Library staff is busy helping other
patrons. Please come into the library or call back later.” How many clients
in our communities surf the Web looking for skilled, immediate help — looking
for us — and end up turning instead to playing “keyword roulette” at the
search engine with the largest advertising budget? Why not channel our
desire for excellence into creating solutions geared to our real, professional
knowledge of our users’ needs and processes? Why not find the answer and
find all of it — and then distribute it to our clients on the World Wide
Web through our intranet or any other delivery mode at our command?

What is your expertise
or the expertise of your information operations? Create tools your clients
can use to help themselves. Use your empathy, your knowledge of the patron,
to organize, design, and communicate in the style that connects best with
your clientele. Collaborate with other experts and offer personal help
to address individual needs either in person, by phone, or via e-mail.
Put your excellence in your client’s face by offering as much depth and
interaction as they need. And be there to partner when they need you.

Will there still
be times when we take on the 100 percent, full-bore research request? Yes,
but this is no longer a typical frontline activity in most public libraries.
We simply must stop thinking of this extraordinary effort as our “real”
job. An in-depth research request now functions as a library form of R&D,
something that stretches our own expertise and skill and lets us know how
far away the goalposts really stand and whether they have moved since the
last time we looked. It also represents our opportunity to coalesce our
expertise into a well-designed, well-maintained, “librarian-quality” metasite
that adds to the cumulative wisdom of the Web and to the eternal credit
of our profession.

This is where specialization,
focus, and teamwork come in: Am I, as a business librarian, building my
skill set and customer value by tracking down genealogical arcana? Should
an art librarian have to study quotation sources on my dime? The more depth
we bring to the party, the more effective (and excellent) partners we will
be. We can’t expect to partner with all clients and all questions and deliver
the kind of service needed. We need to develop products containing our
expertise, in addition to partnering one to one.

What may look like
“dumbed down” reference to our gatekeeper minds is instead a way of distributing
ourselves most appropriately at the point of need, engaging as often as
needed. Is it still half a loaf if you can have all the loaves you like?
Take two and call us in the morning. Or better yet, call us at 2 in the
morning when you get a sudden urge to track down your ancestral roots,
start a business, figure out what to do with all those tiny little apricots
on your lawn, find a job, or have it out with your accountant. My grandmother
would be amazed and proud.

The author would
like to thank all the librarians, public and otherwise, who have shared
their stories in hallways, in coffee shops, over mixed drinks. Our stories
need to be told.

Mary-Ellen Mort
is a librarian and Web developer in Oakland, California, and is the creator
of JobStar: California Job Search Guide (http://jobstar.org),
a public library sponsored Web site for job search and career information
that serves 17,000 daily visitors. JobStar was awarded the American Library
Association’s Gale Award for Excellence in Reference and Adult Services;
Mary-Ellen was the recipient of MCI’s Cybrarian of the Year Award in 1998.